Christmas weeding!

Good morning on this calm, slightly overcast Christmas Day to my house and garden. Aargh! Have just wandered around with my camera - it's a great idea to document the garden on this special day. Yes?

 The Hump Garden.
Weed me!

The gardens I've been working in over the last few weeks look great, and it's so heartening to see the results of my care and devotion. Other areas, having been given their freedom (in other words, having been neglected), get quite a different response.

 Have to dodge the Phormium!
Spot the Path?

Turn gloom into bloom?

There's no place for despondency today, of all days. So I'm changing into my rough gardening shorts, to do some vigorous Christmas Day weeding. I will turn gloom into bloom. A Christmas Day snooze might be appropriate later on...

Five hours later...

I did five hours of Christmas weeding! Amazing! I just kept on going. First of all I cleared all the old Campion from underneath that beautiful Cercis tree in the Hump Garden. Then I dealt to the impassable path. I dug out unhappy clumps of miniature Agapanthus. Dunked them in watery buckets, then picked a handful of cheery orange Alstroemeria flowers for a house vase.

A rose puzzle...

Have a rose puzzle. Suckers of the species rose Woodsii fendleri seem healthy and are growing (the main shrub died back a year or so ago). But I can see little seedlings of the rose growing everywhere. Is this desirable? Another one of 'those' planting mistakes that I can so easily make, garden-wise? Will there be a rose forest in five years time?

Anyway, as well as all this pondering on rose behaviour and rescuing of Agapanthus, five heavy loads of mess came out, and was dumped further along the Hump. Plod, plod. Wow! I didn't leave anything behind.

And now my shorts are soaking in the tub, and I am refreshed, apres gardening in a flowing white cotton shirt and my new avocado green Christmas pants. Am off to read my book and dry my hair in the sun.